Revolutionaries and the INA: the armed streams

Alongside Gandhi's non-violent campaigns, other Indians chose armed resistance. In the early twentieth century, revolutionary groups in Bengal, Maharashtra, and the Punjab assassinated officials, robbed government treasuries to fund their work, and published journals calling for independence by force. Bhagat Singh, who threw a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi in April 1929 as a protest, not as an attempt to kill, and who was hanged on 23 March 1931 with Rajguru and Sukhdev for the killing of a police officer, became the most famous revolutionary martyr, and his writings on socialism and atheism are still read today.

Chandrashekhar Azad, who died in a shootout with police at Allahabad in 1931, and Surya Sen, who led the Chittagong armoury raid in 1930, are other well-known figures, and revolutionary ideas spread through the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, founded in 1928. These groups were small, secret, and heavily infiltrated by the police, and they never mounted a sustained military challenge, but they kept the idea of complete independence alive when the Congress was negotiating, and they inspired a generation of young nationalists.

The largest armed effort came during the Second World War, with the Indian National Army, or INA. Subhas Chandra Bose, who had left the Congress presidency in 1939 after differences with Gandhi, escaped from India in 1941, reached Germany and then Japan, and in 1943 took command of the INA, formed from Indian prisoners of war captured by Japan in South-East Asia. The INA, with its women's regiment, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, fought alongside the Japanese in Burma and reached the Indian border at Imphal and Kohima in 1944, before being defeated and driven back.

The INA's military campaign failed, but its political effect was large. The trials of INA officers at the Red Fort in Delhi in 1945 to 1946 provoked nationwide protests, and the Congress, the Muslim League, and even the Communist Party defended the accused, a rare moment of unity. The INA did not free India, but it showed that Indian soldiers could fight for independence, and it weakened the loyalty of the armed forces on which British rule depended.